Saturday, September 29, 2018

Colombo/Chennai: Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena on Friday said that the LTTE had planned to attack Colombo with an aircraft flying from Chennai in 2009, but strategic analysts and politicians in Chennai dismissed his claim as far-fetched.

“The Tamil Tigers were going to operate an aircraft from Chennai or some other jungle area to bomb and destroy targets in Colombo,” the President said.

Col R Hariharan, a retired military intelligence officer, however, said “Such fiction of LTTE attacking Colombo from Chennai was going around within the Sinhala community then and probably it has resurfaced.”
“Chennai airport was fully secured and the Q branch of the Tamil Nadu police was on high alert. They would have known had the LTTE hatched such a plan,” said Hariharan, now associated with the Chennai centre for China studies and the international law and strategic analysis institute.
Sri Lanka expert Prof P S Suryanarayana said, “India was determined not to allow LTTE into our territory. They did not have any aircraft, let alone using Chennai to attack targets in Colombo. Our airport was under high level precaution. It is wild imagination that the LTTE had plans to attack Colombo from Chennai.”
29/09/18 Times of India